Bill Moyers offers his cogent thoughts on the role of gun-rights outfits like the NRA (and its many, often more rabid, imitators), all of whom in the end are really the well-financed arm of weapons manufacturers, and how they have polluted not just American discourse, but our very way of life itself.

They have done this by several means. One, as Moyers notes, is the legal fraud they have foisted onto the public (and now the courts) with their insistent claim that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own any weapon a person likes. But the other, perhaps more significant, and decidedly more toxic, pollution of American life has been the gun fetishists' violent worldview, manifested in the permeation of guns into all corners of our modern culture -- particularly those where males are involved.

In 1986, the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment achieved new legal authority with the passage of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” This interpretation was supported by a growing body of scholarship, much of it funded by the N.R.A. According to the constitutional-law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law-review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment were “written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the N.R.A. or other gun-rights organizations.” In an interview, former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The debate narrowed, and degraded. Political candidates who supported gun control faced opponents whose campaigns were funded by the N.R.A. In 1991, a poll found that Americans were more familiar with the Second Amendment than they were with the First: the right to speak and to believe, and to write and to publish, freely.

“If you had asked, in 1968, will we have the right to do with guns in 2012 what we can do now, no one, on either side, would have believed you,” David Keene said.

Between 1968 and 2012, the idea that owning and carrying a gun is both a fundamental American freedom and an act of citizenship gained wide acceptance and, along with it, the principle that this right is absolute and cannot be compromised; gun-control legislation was diluted, defeated, overturned, or allowed to expire; the right to carry a concealed handgun became nearly ubiquitous; Stand Your Ground legislation passed in half the states; and, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that the District’s 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia wrote, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Two years later, in another 5–4 ruling, McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Heller to the states.

I think Lepore's succinct conclusion is almost irrefutable:

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Increasingly, it seems that citizenship is defined not by the community we are and which together we build, but by our right to own and carry a gun. To call this an impoverished notion of citizenship is an understatement. It is an outrage.

The usual Republican tactic has been to tell their lie over and over until it becomes "truthiness," and the furor dies down. They've become use to that working, but, for some reason, this time it didn't work out that way. It likely has to do with a number of things.

First off, Pence has screwed this up at every turn. He has a "private" bill signing, but then tweets a picture showing there were, indeed, some obviously important invited guests...and it's easier now for the media to connect the dots on who these guys are, and what their agenda is. Also, Pence's performance on all the news shows and press conferences (except of course the Fox appearance) has been laughable. No one (again, except the Fox echo chamber) is buying the whole, "same as every other bill;" "it actually expands rights for every Indianan;" and "the media has it all wrong."

Combine that with the fact that the best argument they can come up with is that it is just like a bill signed by Clinton over 20 years ago. A lot of folks have done a great job of getting the case in front of the public that this bill is not EXACTLY like the previous bills, and lots of people actually don't give a shit about a bill signed over 20 years ago. Combine all that with the fact that there's been a lot of attitude shifting over the past 20 years in two ways...more LGBT accepting, and less amenable to religions choke-hold on government. (I personally think the krazy kristian kooks have got a little slap happy these past couple of elections, and are now over-playing their hand.)

We are not out of the woods by a long shot, and there are more of these battles to come...and they will be hard fought, but I know these guys never expected the blowback they've received, especially from all the business interests. Hell, it doesn't get any more Republican than the Chamber of Commerce, and even they are throwing a hissy fit. And NASCAR...you're seriously in trouble when NASCAR and the NCAA has turned against you.

Somehow, the stars aligned for people on the right side of history this time, and no one is buying the bullshit they are trying to use to smother this backlash.